Unless otherwise indicated herein, the description provided in this section is not itself prior art to the claims and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
A typical cellular wireless network includes a number of base stations each radiating to define a respective coverage area in which user equipment devices (UEs) such as cell phones, tablet computers, tracking devices, embedded wireless modules, and other wirelessly equipped communication devices (whether or not operated by a human user), can operate. In turn, each base station may be coupled with network infrastructure that provides connectivity with one or more transport networks, such as the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and/or the Internet, for instance. With this arrangement, a UE within a coverage area of a base station may engage in air interface communication with the base station and may thereby communicate via the base station with various remote network entities or with other UEs served by the cellular wireless network.
Further, the cellular wireless network may operate in accordance with a particular air interface protocol or “radio access technology,” with communications from the base stations to UEs defining a downlink or forward link, and communications from the UEs to the base stations defining an uplink or reverse link. Examples of existing air interface protocols include, without limitation, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA (e.g., Long Term Evolution (LTE)), Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) (e.g., 1×RTT and 1×EV-DO), Wireless Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), and Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), among others. Each protocol may define its own procedures for registration of UEs, initiation of communications, handover between coverage areas, and other functions related to air interface communication.
Typically, a wireless service provider operates numerous base stations in a given geographic region, to provide robust air interface coverage to UEs as the UEs move from one location to another. These base stations are usually not associated with any particular subscriber or group of subscribers; rather, they are normally placed in publicly-accessible locations so that their coverage areas blanket cities, rural areas, etc. so that the base stations may be generally accessed by any of the wireless service provider's subscribers. As such, these types of base stations are generally known as “macro base stations,” and the network that they collectively form, or to which they belong, is generally known as a “macro network.”
Many macro-network subscribers, in addition to having wireless service (which may include data service) for their UE, may also have high-speed (“broadband”) Internet access provided through another communication channel. This channel may be cable-modem service, digital-subscriber-line (DSL) service, satellite-based Internet service, and/or some other type of connection to the Internet. For example, a subscriber may have a cable modem connected (a) via a coaxial cable to the cable provider's network and (b) via an Ethernet cable to a wired or wireless (e.g., IEEE 802.11 (WiFi)) router. The router may include one or more Ethernet ports to which computers or other devices may be connected via an Ethernet cable, and may also include wireless-access-point functionality, providing a WiFi packet-data interface to wireless network adapters of devices such as laptop computers, digital video recorders (DVRs), appliances and/or other computing devices.
To address coverage gaps in the macro-network (e.g., poor coverage amidst tall buildings or poor in-building coverage) and for other reasons, wireless service providers may operate various “small cells” (also sometimes referred to as picocells, ubicells, microcells, or as femto-, pico-, ubi-, or micro-base stations or base transceiver stations), which are essentially small, low-power, low-capacity, and low-cost versions of a macro base station. Also, wireless service providers may offer their subscribers a certain sort of small cell known as a “femtocell.” As a general matter, a femtocell, which may be approximately the size of a desktop phone or WiFi access point, may communicate (through a wired or wireless link) with the subscriber's broadband router and may establish a virtual private network (VPN) connection via the Internet with the wireless service provider's core network (e.g., with a femtocell controller on the wireless service provider's network). Further, the femtocell may include a wireless communication interface that is compatible with the subscriber's UE and that is arranged to serve the UE in much the same way that a macro base station does. In this way, the UE is provided access to the core network even though the UE may be located within a coverage gap of the macro network.